Deep thinking increases task-set shielding and reduces shifting flexibility in dual-task performance

Performing two tasks concurrently is difficult, which has been taken to imply the existence of a structural processing bottleneck. Here we sought to assess whether and to what degree one's multitasking abilities depend on the cognitive-control style one engages in. Participants were primed with creativity tasks that either called for divergent thinking-which were suspected to induce a holistic, flexible task processing mode, or convergent thinking-which were assumed to induce a systematic, focused processing mode. Participants showed reduced cross-talk between tasks and increased task-component switching costs (dual-task costs) for the convergent-thinking group compared to both, a divergent-thinking group and a neutral control group. The results suggest that the cognitive-control style people engage in prior to the task predicts their multitasking performance.     

Bewältigung des unerfüllten Kinderwunsches

The article reviews current research in relation to two aspects of involuntary childlessness; firstly, the extent to which involuntary childlessness can be considered a critical life-event and secondly, the short-term effects of childlessness on life-satisfaction and well-being. A study is reported in which 68 middle-aged women (45 to 65 years) who are long term childless because of infertility, are investigated. The study focuses on the extent to which unfilled desire for a child has long term effects on well-being and life-satisfaction. The control group comprised 68 women who did not suffer from fertility problems and became pregnant spontaneously. Life-satisfaction and well-being were assessed using the life-satisfaction questionaire (FLZ; Fahrenberg et al. 2000) and the SCL-90-R (Symptome-Checklist, Derogatis, the German version of Franke 1995). The study shows clearly that psychological well-being is significantly lower in childless middle-aged women compared to women of the same mean age, who have a child. No significant differences were found in social well-being and health. The results support the view that unwanted childlessness may become a chronic stressor. Unintentionally childless middle-aged women do not constitute a clinical group whose need for psychotherapy is urgent. However, the development of specific counselling for women who fail to conceive and those who remain childless in the long term is recommended.     

A Simon effect induced by induced motion and location: Evidence for a direct linkage of cognitive and motor maps

It has been argued that two distinct maps of visual space are formed: a cognitive map that is susceptible to illusions, and a motor map that represents the physical world veridically. In the present study, subjects responded to a nonspatial attribute of a visual target stimulus by pressing a left or right key, while an illusory horizontal displacement of the target was induced. A Simon-type effect was obtained to the induced target motion or position shift—that is, responses were faster when the illusory target motion or location corresponded to the response position. Further experiments indicated that the observed effects cannot be accounted for by attentional shifts. These results suggest that the content of the cognitive map does not only influence perceptual judgments but is also responsible for the automatic activation of response codes. In other words, perception and action seem to be fed by a common, cognitively penetrable, spatial representation.     

The relationship between stimulus processing and response selection in the Simon task: Evidence for a temporal overlap

Summary As is indicated by the Simon effect, choice reactions can be carried out faster when the response corresponds spatially to the stimulus, even if the stimulus location is irrelevant to the task. In Experiments 1–4 the relationships between the Simon effect and stimulus eccentricity, signal quality, and signal-background contrast are investigated. The Simon effect was found to interact with all of these factors, at least when manipulated blockwise. These results are at odds with previous results and are difficult to interpret from an additive-factor-method view. An alternative interpretation is suggested that attributes the results to the temporal relationship between the processing of the relevant stimulus information and stimulus location. The assumption is that a decrease in the Simon effect is caused by every experimental manipulation that markedly increases the temporal distance between the coding of the relevant stimulus information and that of the irrelevant stimulus location. This assumption was tested in Experiment 5 in a more direct way. The stimuli were built up on a screen over time, so that the temporal distance between the presence of location and identity information could be controlled experimentally. The results provide further support for a temporal-delay interpretation of interactions between irrelevant stimulus-response correspondence and factors that affect early stages of information processing.     

Psychosomatische und psychotherapeutische Probleme in der Frauenheilkunde und Geburtshilfe

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Selection and consolidation of objects and actions

Response selection bottleneck models attribute performance costs under dual-task conditions to the human inability to select more than one response at a time. Consistent with this claim Pashler (1991) found that carrying out a speeded manual choice reaction time (RT) task does not impair the unspeeded report of a cued visual target from a masked display. In contrast, Jolicoeur and DellAcqua (1999, Experiment 2) observed pronounced interference between a speeded manual choice RT task and the unspeeded report of a small number of visually presented letters, a finding they attributed to resource sharing between response selection and stimulus consolidation. We demonstrate that comparable costs are obtained with the same task combination used by Pashler (1991) if only task order is reversed—a manipulation that is likely to increase the necessity of consolidating the target stimulus into working memory. We also found that these costs are not diminished if the location of the target to be reported is cued in advance (reducing demands on spatial focusing) and that they do not vary with the number of target features to be reported. These findings support a consolidation account of costs in dual-task performance.     

The effect of fMRI (noise) on cognitive control

Stressful situations, the aversiveness of events, or increases in task difficulty (e.g., conflict) have repeatedly been shown to be capable of triggering attentional control adjustments. In the present study we tested whether the particularity of an fMRI testing environment (i.e., EPI noise) might result in such increases of the cognitive control exerted. We found that participants were more effective in controlling episodic retrieval of previous stimulus-response bindings (Experiment 1), in switching to a new task (Experiment 2), and shielding a current goal from distracting response tendencies (Experiment 3) if they were exposed to challenging task situations, such as 70 dB echo planar imaging noise sampled from an fMRI scanner. These findings have considerable theoretical implications in questioning the widespread assumption that people are equally devoted to easy and more challenging tasks, and methodological implications in raising the possibility that experiments carried out in fMRI scanners or under otherwise challenging conditions systematically overestimate contributions from cognitive control processes.